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Comment by pavel_lishin

2 months ago

> I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company’s technology for my entire professional life. We had an app on the App Store on Day 1 in every sense of the world.

I am surprised that with such a pedigree, the author doesn't already have contacts at Apple they could reach out to for that personal touch.

88 comments

pavel_lishin

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ovi256  2 months ago

> I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success. Ouch. If he can't get it fixed, it's scary

  • bragr  2 months ago

    From my experiences with people at Apple, everyone seems so siloed that it doesn't surprise me that they couldn't help him. It doesn't seem like they have the culture where you could just drop by the Apple fraud team and ask for help for a friend.

    • e28eta  2 months ago

      Or, they hit the brick wall that is US anti-money laundering laws. It’s illegal to “tip off” (warn) the person if they’ve tripped the AML checks.

      At that point, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have on the inside, unless you’ve got one that’s ignorant of the law or willing to risk the penalties.

      1 reply →

  • sodafountan  2 months ago

    [flagged]

    • kragen  2 months ago

      If he succeeds, perhaps you shouldn't care. If he fails, you should care, because that means that the average person will certainly fail. They will lose the cancer test results on their iPhone, the job they use the iPhone for, possibly their home, the copies of their birth certificate on their iPhone, and the friends they could crash with but whose phone numbers they've forgotten because they only communicate with them through iMessage.

      1 reply →

    • mcv  2 months ago

      You don't care that massive unaccountable corporations control all our data, devices and connectivity, and can lock us out of all of that on a whim or accidentally, and refuse to fix the problem?

      This could happen to anyone. It can happen to people trusting Apple with their data, to people using Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other big cloud platform.

      This deserves everybody's attention, and also a massive lawsuit to force these corporations to treat our data more responsibly.

      1 reply →

amelius  2 months ago

I am surprised that evangelists keep thinking they are safe from the evil of big corporations.

vintagedave  2 months ago

I went to Uni with this person (though I doubt they remember me.) They have a very high reputation. If anyone should be able to resolve this, it’s them — that they can’t, and they have to go public, is absolutely terrifying and should make Apple execs pay attention.

I mean that. Exec level. This story and that this specific person cannot get it fixed indicates absolute failure.

kombine  2 months ago

This reminds of a joke we have in Russia which roughly translates into English as follows: "Comrade Stalin, it has been a terrible mistake!" The phrase could belong to one of Stalin's own sycophants who unluckily for themselves got imprisoned and executed during the big purge in the 1930s. They didn't understand why it happened to them.

I have a feeling that this guy also doesn't get why this happened to him and that he himself contributed towards it with the work of his life.